To
critics of airpower, Israels 2006 war with Hizballah exposed the fallacy that
targeting centers of gravity, such as population, command and control, and infrastructure
could coerce the adversary into surrendering, and that airpower could obviate the need for
land forces and independently win wars. Given Israels unexpected challenges in
waging the Lebanon war, airpower and then Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, seen as the
overzealous proponent of airpower, became easy targets in after-action reports, criticism
that ultimately led to Halutzs resignation and replacement by Gaby Ashkenazi, a
former infantry commander.1 But does the Lebanon war warrant a swing
of the strategic pendulum back towards favoring ground forces? What contributed to
Israels unprecedented military challenges in confronting Hizballah? What are the
appropriate strategic lessons to glean from the summer 2006 war in Lebanon?

In examining the
Lebanon campaign, this article highlights three weaknesses in the Israeli strategy. First,
the Israeli leaderships faith in airpower as an antiseptic, low-casualty answer for
modern warfare clouded the possibility of other strategies that may have been more
effective in achieving its objectives. Second, the leadership suffered from the classic
fighting the last war mentality, internalizing the lessons from a military
campaign namely Kosovoin which airpower was successful and applying it to an
incongruous environment. Third, airpower was ultimately counterproductive against an
asymmetric adversary such as Hizballah. By launching mobile katyusha rockets from holy
sites and schools, Hizballah virtually ensured that Israel would inflict civilian
casualties; through its strategic use of the media,

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Hizballah used the
collateral damage to intensify support for its ideology and recruitment. In this
asymmetric environment, airpower and perhaps military force more generally may be limited
in their effectiveness. As this article suggests, only a comprehensive strategy that
integrates airpower and military force into a broader political strategy will ultimately
bring this type of adversary to its knees.

The Airpower
Debate

Proponents and
opponents of airpower have debated its use for almost 100 years, taking on both the
general utility and applications of airpower compared to ground forces. Soon after the
advent of aircraft, and with World War I stagnating in the trenches, General Giulio Douhet
of the Italian General Staff saw airpower as the way out of the standstill. He envisioned
the use of bombers to render the enemy useless by destroying their cities,
population, and will to fight; command of the air, Douhet promised, would translate into
victory.2 His contemporary, Brigadier General William (Billy) Mitchell,
responsible for US air units in France during WWI, shared Douhets view though he
applied it more judiciously, arguing that if airpower successfully targeted transportation
and industry, it could defeat the adversary. Mitchell, like Douhet, tirelessly promoted
the view that airpower should transform what he saw as the atavistic reliance on land and
sea forces. Both men found their views heavily challenged by senior leaders, and Billy
Mitchells efforts to prove the value of airpower by sinking German battleships
during peacetime (the 1920s) ended with his court-martial and resignation from the
military.

The Cold Wars
airpower advocates, including Curtis LeMay, chief of Strategic Air
Commandresponsible for the US bomber and missile-based nuclear arsenalfurther
cemented the reputation that the use of airpower meant strategic bombers to the exclusion
of tactical air and ground support operations, let alone other instruments of power,
whether military or diplomatic. Colonel John Warden (USAF Retired) more elegantly
conceptualized the logic behind airpower and strategic bombing by defining the
adversarys centers of

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gravity and
explaining how airpower would cause physical paralysis and eventually lead to the
enemys resignation.3 Left out of his equation were the
tactical applications of airpower, including integration with ground forces; Warden
reduced the means of success to the strategic applications of airpower. Then Chief of
Staff Halutz, who conducted the Lebanon war, also appears to have bought into the idea
that airpower had superseded ground forces as the key to strategic success. In 2001 he
asserted that I maintain that we also have to part with the concept of a land
battle. . . . Victory is a matter of consciousness. Airpower affects the adversarys
consciousness significantly.4 While the universe of airpower proponents
is by no means monolithic, and despite the fact that modern airpower doctrine emphasizes
combined uses of force rather than airpower as the only decisive instrument, airpower in
these absolutist incarnations has been an easy target for its detractors.

Robert Pape authored
one of the more substantial criticisms of airpower and strategic bombing, arguing in Bombing
to Win that coercion by punishmentthat is, targeting population centers and
infrastructure and thereby undermining the adversarys will and commitment to
fightis highly dubious. Rather than leading to the adversarys concession, as
Warden had argued, Pape found that strategic bombing can actually increase the
adversarys resolve, particularly when the source of conflict is contested territory.
Given their optimism about coercion by punishment, leaders initiating the attack therefore
tend to underestimate the cost and overestimate the likely success. More effective, Pape
argued, is coercion by denial, in which friendly forces target the military assets and
capabilities that the adversary needs to resist, including the fielded forces themselves.
Degrading these assets would hinder the adversarys ability to carry out its end of
the campaign, ultimately leading to its acquiescence.5

While the debates
play themselves out during peacetime, they are particularly lively during and immediately
following operations that seem to provide supporting or disconfirming evidence for one or
the other side. Yet even these empirical measures are hotly debated. For example, the
Kosovo war seemed to provide the most sweeping evidence in support of the argument that
airpower alone can coerce an adversary and bring about victory. Without the use of any
ground forces and with just 78 days of airstrikes, the allied coalition had successfully
forced the Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic, to surrender, leave Kosovo, and accept
the Rambouillet Agreement, seemingly providing an overwhelming success story for airpower.
Subsequent analyses, however, have suggested that airpower alone was not responsible for
the Serbian defeat. Rather, airpower in conjunction with the threat of ground forces,
Russian withdrawal of support for Serbia, and the role of the Kosovo Liberation Army,
helped bring about an end to the Kosovo war.6

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Similarly, the
recent Lebanon war may seem to erode the position of airpower and strategic bombing
advocates. Analysts on both sides of the Atlantic criticized the reliance on airpower as a
way to achieve Israels strategic objectives: to stop the firing of katyusha
rockets against Israeli communities and to return the two abducted soldiers to
Israel.7 In a Washington Post article,
Phillip Gordon argued that strategic bombing has almost never worked and
predicted that the Lebanon campaign would chalk another mark in the loss column for
airpower.8 Robert Pape mused that Israel has
finally conceded that airpower alone will not defeat Hizballah.9 On the Israeli side, critics were quick to conclude that
overreliance on airpower by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) contributed to Israels
apparent inability to pummel a relatively minor terror organization, like Hizballah,
operating from the smallest, weakest nation in the region.10

Airpower did offer
an easy scapegoat for Israels challenges in the August conflict, since the campaign
strategy did rely heavily on strategic bombing to achieve its objectives and the IDF did
not ultimately operate as decisively and successfully as many had expected. Results of the
first major postwar investigation (the Shomron report) and the nearly concomitant
resignation of General Halutz in January 2007 have renewed domestic and international
criticism of Israels reliance on air power during the conflict.11 But
just as the causes of victory in the Kosovo campaign are more textured than a cursory
study would indicate, the causes of difficulty in Lebanon are more nuanced than simply
arguing that airpower was again a perennial failure.

While airpower did
not achieve Israels strategic objectivesthe two soldiers remain unreturned12 and Hizballah was still launching 100 rockets a day into
Israel up until the tenuous UN-sponsored cease-fireit also was not an abject
failure.13 The IDF, operating primarily through its
air assets, is thought to have eliminated about 500 of Hizballahs most advanced
fighters, and forced many of the others to evacuate the areas south of the Litani River.
Use of airpower did destroy about half of the unused longer-range rockets, and much of
Lebanons infrastructureused to resupply Hizballahwas destroyed. After
the war, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah indicated that had he understood the degree to
which Israel would retaliate, he may have been more cautious about the capture of two
Israeli soldiers in the first place, which perhaps suggests that his experiences with the
August 2006 conflict will make him more reluctant to push Israel too far in the future.14 In
other words, the IDF may have encountered challenges but may also have fought defiantly
enough to create a deterrent for future Hizballah aggression, though this claim will only
be confirmed or refuted over time.

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The Allure of
Airpower

That said, Israel
encountered unprecedented challenges from Hizballah compared to its previous successes
against Arab states in the region for three main reasons. First, Israel military and
civilian leaders seem to have been seduced by the idea that airpower generally and
strategic bombing specifically could antiseptically win wars and therefore made land
warfare anachronistic. As General Halutz has argued, Many air operations
were generally implemented without a land force, based on a worldview of Western
societys sensitivity to losses. A land force is not sent into action as long as
there is an effective alternative. . . . This obliges us to part with a number of
anachronistic assumptions, including that land forces are a requirement for victory.15 Airpower was thought to provide a low-costprimarily
in terms of casualtiesway to defeat the adversary. Israel maintained that it could
use stand-off weaponry and inflict sufficient amount of pain on the civilian population to
the extent that it would turn its support against Hizballah and create a local
political reaction to Hizballahs adventurism.16 According to this vision, airpower could achieve those
strategic objectives while exposing the IDF to a much lower risk of casualties than if
they were to strive to win with a ground attack, since there is no ground battle
without casualties.17

The victory
from the air thesis had gradually gained traction in Israel over the 1980s and
1990s, replacing what one airpower critic has referred to as the Ben Gurion
model of definitive victory through fierce and bold maneuvering. Israels experiences
with a costly 18-year occupation of Lebanon after the first Lebanon war had given them
pause in terms of deploying ground troops back to the same region.18 Moreover, some observers noted that emphasis on economic
stability over state security had also made high-risk strategies, such as those that might
involve high casualties, less attractive: Israeli governments in recent years have
been so preoccupied with stoking the economy that they have been reluctant to take the
steps necessary to ensure long-term security for fear of spooking the markets.19 In its place was a mindset in which success and failure
were measured by the number of fallen soldiers, which was likely to be higher through the
use of ground forces than through airpower. This measure, however, inevitably constrained
options available to achieve the states objectives. As one Israeli critic noted,
If counting the fallen causes vacillation and indecisiveness, and annihilates
ambition to deliver a strategic victory, how could gains become anything but losses, in
terms of strategic objectives or loss of life?20 Ultimately, operational imperatives and domestic preferences
operated in different directions. Achieving the objectives called for an approach that
integrated more ground forces with the use of airpower, but IDF leadership and domestic
preferences

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called for a lower casualty strategy,
which meant heavier reliance on stand-off approaches such as air raids and launching
missiles from afar.

In one incisive
after-action analysis, a prominent Israeli columnist sought to identify the cause of the
IDFs challenges: Usually, the accusation of folly is directed at battle-hungry
generals and warmongering politicians. However, at the end of this war, the accusation of
folly will be directed at an entire cadre of Israeli opinion-makers and social leaders who
lived in a bubble and caused Israel to live in a bubble. That bubble, he writes, is
set off from a reality in which Israels survival should have been predicated on its
willingness to defend its interests through all necessary means. By fighting through means
thought to limit casualties, that is, through an emphasis on stand-off airpower, they
compromised their ability to defend themselves. The columnist Ari Shavit concludes that
for the Israeli leadership, Its caution is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to
prevent bloodshed is costing a great deal of bloodshed.21

The words sound
dramatically similar to those of Clausewitz, who offered sage advice on the potential
consequences of strategic restraint:

Kind-hearted people
might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without
too much bloodshed, and might imagine this the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it
sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the
mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst . . . It would be futileeven
wrongto try and shut ones eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at
its brutality.22

The ineffectiveness
of such restraintairpower in the case of Lebanonpresented Israeli military
planners with a conundrum, however. What was the optimal course of action in response to a
small-scale terrorist attack or in this case troop capture? The question is complicated
because using the stand-off, lower-risk strategy of airpower could be ineffective, while
ground forces were likely to sustain heavy losses, making that option not palatable
domestically or internationally.

Unfortunately, this
was the corner into which the Israeli leadership had painted itself. Once it decided to
launch a retaliatory strike against Hizballah in exchange for their capture of two Israeli
soldiers, its strategic options became limited. While it was incumbent upon the leadership
to develop a strategy that would achieve the objectives of retrieving the soldiers and
disarming Hizballah, the leadership and domestic audience were unprepared for a land-based
strategy that was likely to yield higher casualties. Ari Shavit laments that Israel had
become a country for which not many are willing to kill and be killed.23 Mentalities that favored economic stability and low
civilian casualties constrained options; leaders either needed to adjust that mentality

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to accord with reality or perhaps not
launch a war unless willing to use the means necessary to win.

Fighting
Another Militarys Last War

Second, the Israeli
leadership appears to have fallen prey to the fighting the last war way of
thinking. What reinforced its growing attachment to airpower as an antiseptic way to win
wars at low cost was its observations of airpowers successes in previous campaigns,
specifically the Kosovo campaign of 1999. Israeli leaders had referred to Lebanon as
an updated edition of the successful NATO aerial operation in Kosovo in 1999.24 General Halutz, the chief architect of the IDFs
response in Lebanon, and other senior IDF leaders had observed the Kosovo war, its
reliance on airpower, and the apparent connection with a rapid, victorious outcome, and
sought to adopt that intervention as a model of strategic behavior.25
Their interpretation of Kosovo as a success story due to airpower reinforced the
pre-existing faith in airpower as a decisive tool in combat and reinforced their
commitment to its use in future operations.

Under any
circumstance, the problem of fighting the last war may be detrimental for
militaries, since the current or future war may look less like the previous war than
planners may think.26 What exacerbated that problem in the case of Lebanon is that the
IDF was projecting lessons from a different state or set of states and against a different
type of adversary onto a dramatically different setting.

Appropriating the
lessons from conflicts such as Kosovo, which had apparently achieve[d] victory on
the cheap via airpower, proved problematic primarily because the adversary in
Lebanon was significantly different from the fight against Milosevic in Kosovo.27 Whereas the Serbians had used more conventional tactics,
with some reasonably effective surface-to-air missiles, Hizballah relied on guerilla-style
tactics against which airpower had less impact. Unlike the Serbians, for example,
Hizballah hid elusive rocket launchers among the civilian population. Not only were the
targets difficult to hit using airpower, Hizballahs tactic of hiding targets among
civilians meant that the inevitable casualties fanned the flames of support for Hizballah.
Israel might have been beguiled by the low rate of casualties in Kosovo, but it tried to
adopt a model that was ill-suited to its own circumstances, and even then adapted it
without adding the tool that may have ultimately brought the Serbians to their knees: the
threat of massive ground forces. At no time did Israel indicate with any degree of resolve
the prospect of introducing large numbers of ground forces. Only the last weekend in the
34-day war did Israel mobilize enough reserves and promise a ground inva-

78/79

sion, two days
before the international community intervened and imposed a cease-fire under UN
Resolution 1701.28

The Unique
Challenges of Asymmetric Operations

Understanding the
implications of fighting the last war leads to the third major lesson from the Lebanon
campaign: campaigns against asymmetric adversaries bring with them a unique set of
challenges. Many of Israels previous military successes had been against Arab state
militaries in more conventional force-on-force settings; these militaries had high-value
targets worthy of striking, and Israels material advantage has consistently
translated into high degrees of success, giving Israel uncontested superiority in
the realm of conventional warfare.29 Campaigns against adversaries such as Hizballah show that having
material and technological advantages do not necessarily translate into success on the
battlefield, as Hizballah has managed to reverse decades of Arab military
humiliation, surviving the Israeli onslaught of the 2006 war in Lebanon.30

Paradoxically,
perhaps Hizballahs greatest advantage was that it lacked high-value assets. In that
way, they were like other terrorist or insurgent groups, which according to Airpower in
Small Wars authors James S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson, rarely present lucrative
targets for aerial attack, and even more rarely is there ever a chance for airpower to be
employed in a strategic bombing campaign or even in attack operations on any large
scale.31 Lacking high-value targets, such as industrial facilities and
robust command and control nodes, Israels main targets became Hizballah leadership,
fielded forces, and weapons, hid among the civilians and difficult to target.

Against these
elusive targets, the IDFs attempt to use long-range bombs and artillery to disarm
and defeat Hizballah was intractable, the operational equivalent of finding needles in
haystacks. Not only did the IDF have limited success in killing Hizballah leadership and
destroying the mobile rocket launchers, but in trying to target the elusive leaders and
katyushas, the IDF inevitably contributed to the number of Lebanese civilian casualties.32
Rather than mobilizing the population against Hizballah, the collateral damage seemed to
have the opposite effect, rallying and recruiting sympathizers to its side in the fight
against Israel.

The Media as a
Multiplier Effect

Hizballahs
strategy of using mosques and day care centers as weapons caches or hideouts for leaders
meant that targeting those facilities would lead to casualties that looked egregious and
disproportional when

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portrayed in the
media. Hizballahs savvy use of the media acted as a multiplier effect for its
asymmetric advantages. By showcasing the damage in Lebanon and portraying the Israeli
attacks against civilians as inhumane, Hizballah was able to generate sympathy for its
actions among the Lebanese domestic audience and also internationally. Photographs and
video images, sometimes even those that had been manipulated for anti-Israeli effect,33 became a rallying cry for Hizballah individuals in the
region and beyond. In addition to the Arabs in the immediate region who were thought to
have been fighting alongside Hizballah, the United Nations found evidence that at least
700 Somali Islamic militants traveled to Lebanon to fight against Israel.34 Hizballah played the public relations campaign expertly
and was able to use its media successes to recruit hundreds or thousands of foreign
fighters. Clearly, Hizballah understood, as al Qaedas number two leader has
observed, that more than half of the Islamists battle is taking place in
the battlefield of the media.35

In addition to the
individual level support that Hizballahs media campaign generated, it also worked to
build support from key states in the region. First, it helped mute opposition from the
more moderate Saudi, Jordanian, and Egyptian governments which had initially been critical
of Hizballahs actions but shifted their position in the wake of public
protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing.36 Second, by portraying the conflict as a pan-Islamic fight
against Israel, Hizballah was able to galvanize support from the Shia Iranians and Sunni
Syrians. While Iran and Syria have serious religious differences, they were unified in
their antagonism towards Israel, and the battle that played out in Lebanon served to
consolidate these countries support for Hizballah. The support translated into a
continuing supply of weapons, fighters, and funding so that Hizballah could continue its
armed opposition against Israel.37

In terms of
strategic calculations, the amount of effort needed to overcome the adversary is the
combination of the total means at his disposal and the strength of his will.38 By vilifying Israeli tactics in the media, Hizballah was
able to recruit outside assistance and thus increase the means at its disposal.
Moreover, its use of the media consolidated the will of its supporters. By merely
demonstrating some ability to resist Israel and by making theatrical public speeches at
Hizballah rallies, Nasrallah became a cult of personality behind which a much augmented
population base followed.39 The combined effect of increased means of disposal plus increased
strength of will raised the cost of victory for Israel.

The media also came
into play in eroding the strength of will on the part of Israel and its close ally, the
United States. Most of the international community agreed that in principle, retaliation
against Hizballah for capturing two

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Israeli soldiers was
justified.40 But as the conflict continued and
Hizballah members began positioning themselves so they could document footage of Israel
destroying civilian assetswhich often contained weapons that Hizballah could use
against Israel, such as katyusha rocketsquestions of proportionality began to arise.
This assertion does not weigh in on whether Israels approach was entirely
proportional, but does make the claim that Hizballah used the ambiguity of the
proportionality doctrine to its advantage, largely through projections in the media. The
Israeli government later acknowledged that the images of IDF raids in Beirut and the
resulting civilian damage eroded its international support over the course of the
conflict.41

Gradually, members
of the international community began to question the proportionality, a trend that peaked
with the ill-fated attack on the Lebanese town of Qana. The collateral damage inflicted on
Qanaalmost inevitable given that Hizballah was fighting from within densely
populated civilian areasprompted widespread criticism for Israels approach to
the conflict. International reactions to the attack caused Israel to suspend air-strikes
for 48 hours, but the implications of the attack went beyond Israeli foreign policy. The
attacks illustrated in heart-breaking images the enormous risks for the United
States in the current Middle East crisis.42 The United States was already in a difficult position of on the
one hand seeking to support its ally, but on the other trying to mitigate anti-Americanism
in a region with high strategic importance. Negotiating that balance became more difficult
with each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon,43
particularly Qana. While the United States formally maintained its support for Israel,
these incidents and the images that followed no doubt shortened the timeline that it would
allow Israel to prosecute the war, which in turn constrained Israels strategic
options.

Lessons from
Lebanon

Given the limited
effects of airpower against asymmetric adversaries, and the domestically and
internationally unpopular prospect of using ground forces against Hizballah, what were
Israels strategic options? The Israeli government could not stand by and appear to
do nothing when rockets were falling on Israeli towns and soldiers were being captured.
Moreover, the government, new to office and seeking to fill the large shoes left by
General Sharon, was right to assert its right of self-defense and retaliate in some
manner. While airpower offered a way to demonstrate leadership resolve and appeal to
societys interest in doing something, and without the need to mount legislative and
civilian support for the otherwise riskier strategy of using ground troops, it clearly
faced challenges in the execution. What are the lessons to draw from those challenges?

81/82

The first lesson,
based on this analysis, would be to suggest caution when applying anything but
contextualized lessons from the last war. Certainly, no two wars are the same, but some
are more similar than others. Noting the strategic contextconventional, asymmetric,
etc.is key to understanding how best to match the strategy to the adversary. By
thinking not just about whether a particular approach worked, but by placing that approach
in a particular context and then evaluating its utility, leaders may be better able to
avoid the pathology of fighting a war that happens to be incongruent with their immediate
context.

A second lesson is
perhaps not that airpower is a categorical failure, but that it does not promise the
antiseptic elixir that some leaders are seeking. If leaders are serious about providing
security, they must identify their strategic objectives and match them with appropriate
and realistic instruments and be willing to use those instruments even at the risk of
incurring casualties. Conflicts such as the Gulf War and Kosovo may have given the
impression that high precision stand-off weapons can deliver victory with few casualties,
but these may have been the anomalies. The very nature of a war makes bloodshed likely.
While acting within the bounds of proportionality, a states leaderships
business is to provide for their states security and win wars;
kind-heartedness is not always the best way to achieve that goal.

Third, the outcome
of a conventional military against an asymmetric adversary may show that not just
airpower, but military force in general may have limited effectiveness in this type of
unconventional environment. Given the way opponents use casualties as political theater
for generating support, the use of military force, which inevitably leads to casualties,
will likely only invigorate a resistance that is founded more on an ideology than on the
material power that fuels conventional militaries. Since the opposition is as much
ideological as military, then it is not clear that only the use of forceland, air,
or some combination thereofwill itself bring the adversary to its knees. Rather, the
use of force should be integrated within a broader political strategy designed to collapse
support for the adversary.

In these asymmetric
settings, much of the conflict may play out in the battlefield of the media. The centers
of gravity against asymmetric adversaries may not be their infrastructure and command and
control nodes, which are severely lacking compared to regular armies. Lacking high-value
assets, the centers of gravity for asymmetric adversaries may become their citizens
political will. And as the case of the Lebanon war and the draw for foreign fighters and
civilians shows, citizens may not mean the citizens of that particular state,
but the individuals who are inclined in a similar ideological way, whether they live in
Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, or Egypt. The public relations battle therefore may not be
limited to information operations (IO) in the im-

82/83

mediate area of
operations, in this case Lebanon, but across boundaries, targeting individuals that may be
sympathetic to the cause taking place on foreign lands. Any information operations
strategy, whether jamming radio transmissions of the adversary or disseminating
information favorable to friendly forces, must therefore be deployed not just locally but
on a more widespread basis, to include potential foreign fighters.

Moreover, to the
extent that asymmetric battles may be part of a broader ideological struggle, any wartime
IO strategies must be combined with wider-ranging political strategies. First and
foremost, that means addressing the Middle East peace process, since tensions in the
Middle East are an ongoing source of recruitment for terrorist organizations. More
generally, however, that means that the US and its allies must press harder in their
public diplomacy efforts to bridge the ideological divide between east and west. Until
these Western states can make advances on the battlefield of public relations, they are
unlikely to see decisive victories on the battlefield of tanks, missiles, and planes.

3. John Warden, The
Air Campaign: Planning for Combat. (Washington: National Defense Univ. Press, 1988).

4. Zeev
Schiff, The Foresight Saga, Haaretz, 18 August 2006.

5. Robert Pape, Bombing
to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996).

6. Daniel L. Byman
and Matthew C. Waxman, Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate, International
Security, 24 (Spring 2000), 5-38.

7. The official
Israel Defense Force Web site suggests that Operation Change of Direction was intended to
achieve these two strategic objectives. See the July 2006 summary of IDF events at
http://www1.idf.il/DOVER/site/mainpage.asp?sl=EN&id=7&docid=59888.EN.

9. Robert Pape,
Ground to a Halt, The New York Times, 3 August 2006.

10. Yuval Steinitz,
The War That Was Led Astray, Haaretz, 17 August 2006.

11. The Israeli
government has commissioned several studies on the performance of the IDF during the
Lebanon war, including the Shomron study, whose findings were released in January 2007,
and the Winograd Study, due out in the spring. Former Chief of Staff Dan Shomron found in
his investigation that the IDF lacked goals and suffered from poor leadership during the
2006 Lebanon war; he did not directly call for Halutzs resignation but Halutz
nonetheless resigned soon thereafter. For reactions to the Shomron report and Halutz
resignation, see Yaniv Salama-Sheer, International Press Agrees that Halutz was
Responsible, The Jerusalem Post, 18 January 2007, p. 3.

12. As of December
2006, the two soldiers had not been returned and it was not clear that they were actually
still alive. See Donald Macintyre, Israeli Soldiers Seriously Injured in
Kidnapping That Sparked War, The Independent, 6 December 2006, p. 38.

13. David Makovsky
and Jeffrey White note that Israeli strikes did little to neutralize Hizballahs
rocket launching capabilities. See Lessons and Implications of the Israel-Hizballah
War: A Preliminary Assessment, Policy Focus #60, October 2006. A publication of the
Washington Institute for Near East Studies. For an additional perspective on whether
Israel achieved these objectives, see Jim Quilty, Israels War Against
Lebanons Shia, The Middle East Report, 25 July 2006,
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero072506.html.

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14. Daniel Byman and
Steven Simon provide an excellent account of the Lebanon campaign in The No-Win
Zone: An After-Action Report from Lebanon, The National Interest, 86
(November/December 2006), 55-61.

15. Zeev
Schiff, The Foresight Saga, Haaretz, 16 August 2006.

16. Thom Schanker,
To Disarm Shadowy Guerilla Army, Israeli Air Power May Not be Enough, The
New York Times, 20 July 2006, p. A10.

26. These cognitive
shortcutsthat is, making what may be false analogies with events that bear similar
characteristicsare well-documented in the international relations literature, most
notably Robert Jerviss Perception and Misperception in International Politics
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976).

28. General Halutz
has since been criticized for waiting until late in the conflict to consider seriously the
possibility of launching a ground invasion of Lebanon. See, for example, Yaakov Katz,
Levine War Probe Places Blame on Halutzs Shoulders, The Jerusalem
Post, 7 December 2006; Ilene R. Prusher, Israeli Unease Grows Over Conduct of
War, The Christian Science Monitor, 1 September 2006.

29. Israels
National Security Doctrine suggests that these successes result in part because of
Israels better training and higher sophistication of resources. See David Rodman,
Israels National Security Doctrine: An Introductory Overview, Middle
East Review of International Affairs, 5 (September 2001). Israels success rate
against asymmetric adversaries such as Hizballah has been more mixed. For an account of
this history, see Dan Byman Israel and the Lebanese Hizballah, in Democracy
and Counterterrorism: Lessons from the Past (Washington: United States Institute of
Peace Press, 2007).

30. Middle East
expert Ray Takeyh points out that Hizballah was better able to defend itself than
lions of Arab nationalism such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Mr. Hussein defended Cairo
or Baghdad - the seats of Islamic civilisation. See The Rising Might of the
Middle East Superpower, The Financial Times, 11 September 2006, p. 11.

32. See The
Economists critique of the use of airpower in Lebanon, entitled An
Enduring IllusionAir Power, 26 August 2006, special report.

33. There is some
evidence to suggest that international media outlets were complicit with pro-Hizballah
individuals who staged or posed pictures intended to imply a high rate of IDF-inflicted
civilian casualties. See, for example, Dave Kopel, Were Front-Page Photos
Staged? Rocky Mountain News, 12 August 2006, p. 12C.

Sarah E. Kreps is a senior fellow
at the Institute of International Law and Politics at Georgetown University and an adjunct
professor of political science at George Washington University. She has an undergraduate
degree from Harvard, a graduate degree from Oxford, and is currently finishing her Ph.D.
dissertation on US military interventions at Georgetown University. She has served on
active duty in the US Air Force, where she worked on developmental programs for the US,
UK, and NATO. She also served as a foreign area officer for European and Sub-Saharan
African affairs.